The Reunion

An Old Friend Adds Sparkle To Uruguay Visit

March 20, 1994|By Thomas Swick, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay — Somebody did not want me coming to Uruguay.

I had no idea of this when I arrived. Montevideo seemed a peaceable place. The airport was homey; exuberant relatives created a small turbulence in the arrivals hall and a stray mongrel paraded unhindered behind the ticket counters. A Rotary wheel welcomed me on the road into town.

The bellman at my hotel wore a look of wan officiousness. He fumbled nervously with the keys, then led me into a cool dark chamber with a heavy old-fashioned telephone on the night stand. As soon as he left, I picked up the phone and called Cristina.

"Tom! Welcome to my country! Will I still recognize you?"

I had not seen Cristina since 1987, when she left Philadelphia to come back home. I used to walk past her house on my way to work; some evenings I'd stop; often she'd threaten to return with her two children to Montevideo, which she missed. Her ex-husband, an artist and her best friend, lived in Washington, D.C.

She and I were friends, too, although not best; she attracted men with her fiery good looks, her easy smile, her long luxuriant blue-black hair. Almost everything I knew about Uruguay I had learned sitting at Cristina's kitchen table in Philadelphia.

A little before 6 I went downstairs to meet her on Avenida 18 de Julio, in the heart of downtown. The sidewalk brimmed with office workers heading home. The men, like the buildings around them, looked a slightly less sophisticated version of their counterparts in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Interspersed in the crowd was the occasional schoolboy or girl in the obligatory white smock with an enormous, exaggerated blue bow at the neck. At first I thought the decoration hideous, but then I wondered if any playground bully, dressed in such an outfit, could ever get away with calling somebody else a sissy.

There was also a whole population of young women in a kind of uniform-white blouse, short tight black skirt, black stockings, black high heels. The whiteness of the blouse sharply divided the matching blackness of skirt and hair like the center stripe in a tri-color flag. The street was wigged with the blackest hair I'd ever seen.

Finally I spotted Cristina. She was wearing a short black skirt and a black leather jacket over a white blouse. Her hair was a bit shorter, just touching her shoulders, but as thick and dark as I remembered it. We hugged among the weary workers.

She was employed by a bank, she told me, in the old city. Montevideo was full of banks, a city of safes. "It's why we were called the Switzerland of South America. And we were small and prosperous. Now," she said smiling, "we're just small."

Salaries were pitifully low-the average wage was about $180 a month-and goods expensive. "I'm sure you've seen it in the faces," she said. "People are struggling. And tired. Tired of thinking all the time about how they'll get by." She showed me the book she was carrying; she was buying it, she said, on installments.

Her children were her solace: Juan Pablo, 14, Valeria, 17. "Now that they're older, I can talk to them about everything. It's like they're not just my children, they're my friends." I remembered Valeria at 11, a Madonna wanna-be in Philadelphia. Now, Cristina said, she was into the music of the '60s and cooking our dinner.

The two of them, with Valeria's boyfriend, sat watching an American police show when we arrived at the small house in the Prado neighborhood. Valeria looked like a child of the '60s, with her long brown hair worn straight and parted in the middle. She had inherited her mother's good looks. She turned off the television almost at once and joined our conversation. "It was so nice of you to come all this way to visit us," she said.

Dinner was chicken in an onion and mushroom sauce. Over a bottle of Argentine wine, we talked about life in Montevideo. The schools were poor, they said; children went only half days, Valeria in the morning, Juan Pablo in the afternoon. The system catered to Juan Pablo's propensity to sleep till noon.

Cristina said that, because of pressure from the Catholic Church, there was virtually no AIDS education in school. This despite the fact that the church had very little influence on people's personal lives. "Uruguayans are not religious," she said.

The kids complained mildly about the lack of variety in Montevideo, the paucity, for instance, of American fast food. The advantage, I thought, as I helped myself to another wing, was that teen-agers no longer dependent on burgers learned to cook delicious dinners.

They rarely left the city. "The countryside is boring," Juan Pablo complained. "Uruguayans are not farmers," Cristina admitted. Their one escape was to the seashore, every summer, far to the north of Punta del Este. That famous resort, they said, was full of people from Buenos Aires, portenos "who come over and act as if they own the place."